Located three miles from downtown Pittsburgh in a 140-acre campus, Carnegie Mellon is a private research university, founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools.
Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist whose vision was to open a vocational training school for the offspring of working class Pittsburghers. In 1967, Carnegie Tech merged with the Mellon Institute, a science research center founded by the Mellon family of Pittsburgh.
Today, Carnegie Mellon is home to 13,650 students from 114 countries, split roughly evenly between undergraduates and postgraduates. Globally, it regularly ranks in the top 50 universities, but excels in certain disciplines: in 2018, Carnegie Mellon was ranked third in the world for computer science in the QS World University Rankings by Subject. It also featured in the top 10 globally for statistics and operational research.
For the Class of 2021, Carnegie Mellon had an overall admissions rate of 13.53 percent, with the acceptance rates of individual colleges varying significantly: for the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences it was 22 percent, while applicants had a meagre 7 percent chance of admission to the School of Computer Science.
Carnegie Mellon has a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to research and education, establishing programs and centers outside the limitations of departments or colleges and becoming a leader in new fields such as computational finance, information systems, and cognitive sciences.
There are seven academic divisions at Carnegie Mellon, including one of the oldest colleges of fine arts in the United States, as well as schools in the humanities and social sciences; engineering; information systems and public policy; science; and computer science.
Student life at Carnegie Mellon features over 225 student societies and organizations, art galleries, and various singular traditions. Carnegie Mellon's campus houses galleries such as The Frame, and the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, which specializes in contemporary art.
Top class performing arts are staged by students at the Carnegie Mellon School of Music, the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama and the student-run theatrical organization Scotch'n'Soda.
Inspired by Andrew Carnegie's Scottish heritage, as well as the Mellon family's Scots-Irish ancestry, a Celtic flavor runs through the campus, manifested in Scotty, the Scottish Terrier mascot, The Tartan student newspaper, Skibo Gymnasium, The Thistle yearbook, and the Céilidh weekend every fall semester for homecoming.
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